23. Louise
23
LOUISE
Peter was sitting on the guest house’s porch.
“Will you take a walk with me?” Louise asked.
She offered her hand, and he accepted it, and it didn’t feel new or remarkable. It felt right.
When they were surrounded by the deepest, oldest part of the orchard, where the trees grew thick and gnarled and wild, Louise stopped. Peter’s expression was questioning but also patient. He hadn’t asked for an explanation once, not since they sat together under the magnolia tree and she’d asked him to stay in Crozet a little longer.
Louise took a deep breath as the tangled branches above them crowded out the sky. Peter watched her, his entire body still in a way it rarely was, as though he had always known that every moment of their lives would lead to this morning in the shadows of the orchard.
“I was so scared to tell you the truth, about the accident, about how I really saved you.” Louise paused. “But that wasn’t all of it.”
“What else were you scared to tell me?” His voice was cautious, but also hopeful.
He stepped closer to her, until he was only inches away, and her heart skipped inside of her chest.
Louise had brought Peter there to say the words, but standing here she understood that some emotion could only be expressed by touch.
Peter let out a soft note of surprise as she kissed him once. She pulled back, a shy smile playing on her lips, until he grabbed her face and tugged her back toward him. Everything faded around them. The wind quieted. The birds went silent. Louise felt bathed in a light unlike any she had ever known.
When they finally drew back, Peter’s palm still on her neck, his face cracked open in a grin and the trees rustled in the breeze again. “You could have led with that.”
Energy radiated up and down her body. She allowed herself to fill up on the possibility of what was next, of long summer days that spilled into each other, and fall together in Richmond. Peter could take community college classes and Louise could apply to nursing school for the second semester. They could even travel together, use Peter’s generous graduation money from his grandparents, visit the towns mentioned in her grandmother’s journal, Honfleur and Cordon, the sea and the mountains, all the places where the book of healing had been written. The future shimmered with new possibility.
“I want to spend the summer with you. Just us.”
“You mean it?”
Louise nodded. “I mean it.”
That grin grew impossibly wider, and he kissed her again.
After, Peter looked over her shoulder toward her grandmother’s house. “Why did you need me to stay here? What’s going on?” he murmured, his hand on her waist.
Some of the brightness inside of her dimmed as she thought of her grandmother, of what came next, the reason Peter could live. “I actually need to get back.” She worked to keep her voice steady. “Can you wait? A little longer.” She tried to hold on to the hope she felt when she kissed him, with the promise of tomorrow, even as she felt storm clouds looming, a grief she would have to weather, the same way the women before her had weathered their own squalls and tempests. “Will you wait here, at the guest house?”
Peter looked down at her hand, woven inside of his own. “Of course.”
Louise began to walk back to her grandmother’s house, but she paused after a few feet and turned back. Peter hadn’t moved from where they’d stood under the apple trees.
“I should have said it at Kyle’s party. After you said it to me,” she told him.
She took a small breath. She felt the ground shift beneath her, as though she were back in the mountains, jumping off the ledge into the blue depths beneath.
“That maybe I’ve always loved you too.”